1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved solar thermal collector which allows for the low cost shipment and easy assembly of the system for greater cost effectiveness and practical application by the user.
2. Description of the Related Art
Traditional solar water heating collectors are large, heavy, awkward to deal with as well as expensive to ship and install. The UPS2001 solar water heater solves all of these problems. Past attempts to make solar systems low cost to ship have resulted in tiny collectors which require more than one collector to be of any usable effect at all. For their size, they were still quite heavy, awkward to install and required excess plumbing due to multiple collectors. Representative examples of prior art collectors are the "SunEarth" solar energy collector whose smallest collector, the 22s/f EMC 38 solar energy collector weighs in at 90 lb., the "Heliodyne" 32 s/f GOBI 408 solar energy collector weighing in at 133 lb. and the "AET" 21s/f AE-21 solar energy collector weighing in at 90 lb. None of these collectors can be installed by one person or shipped by a low cost parcel service like UPS.
As cost effectiveness is a vital aspect in a customers consideration for the purchase of a solar water heater, anything that adds to cost and difficulty are enemy to the success of these products in the marketplace. Shipping for a standard system can easily exceed $100.00, for a UPS shipped system as low as $25.00. Two or more people are required to safely install traditional solar water heaters, for this UPS system, one capable person can do it easily due to the decreased size and weight and clever modular design.
The truly great difference is in the clever design which makes the system particularly "user friendly" and the embodiments allowing for this user friendliness is what this patent seeks to protect. This design is the results of years of intensive work in the solar water heating field and solves crucial problems such as costly shipping, difficult and dangerous handling due to weight and awkward dimensions, difficult installations due to awkward mounting systems including the need for nuts and bolts, numerous tools and copper pipe soldering in the installation of the collector and system that have thwarted the mass marketing of solar water heaters over the last two decades. This invention addresses all these problems and solves them in an elegant, modular manner which allows for great flexibility by allowing for the system to be as large or as small as is needed by the user.